


My Favorite Childhood Books…

by pixiealtaira



Series: 30 Days of Lists challenge [13]
Category: Glee
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:49:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23387644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pixiealtaira/pseuds/pixiealtaira
Summary: Prompt 13.	My Favorite Childhood Books…
Series: 30 Days of Lists challenge [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1679446
Kudos: 13





	My Favorite Childhood Books…

Kurt Hummel had a hard time answering what his favorite childhood books were. His mom had read everything to him and they watched a lot of movies and listened to a lot of music. He’d never slept all that much, even as an infant.

He grew up listening to as much Dragon Riders of Pern and Earth’s Children and romance novels as Harry Potter and Tom Sawyer and Eight Cousins. He heard those childhood classics as much as he heard Little Golden Books and Little Critter books and little board books that filled his house…although the Little Golden books and those kinds of books were way easier to read by himself once he figured out that the same two letters spelled the same sounding word in every book they owned. His Aunt told him he couldn’t possibly remember, but Kurt clearly remembered when it clicked that that if that one set of letters made the same word in all the books that that probably held true for more sets of letters in books as well. He had been quite small and had gone running to his mom to show her his discovery and she just clapped and laughed and showered him with kisses for being her brilliant magically wonderful child. His mom didn’t stop reading to him though. His mom read him everything. His mom even read him the recipes as she cooked. She once told him that she figured he needed to hear her as much as she needed to hear a voice in the house and so she read and talked when music and movies weren’t playing.

She found and bought him Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books of many Colors for when he started school, and Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers complete collections for Christmas that year. They bought books from book orders as often as they could, his mother often doing seamstress jobs to get the bit of cash she needed to indulge him. For his next birthday his mother gave him all the Magic Tree House books that had been published at that time, and he could read them just fine. Over the summer his mother bought and read to him the Little House books. By the next fall though, he wanted bigger books and his mother gave him The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins…and Anne of Green Gables and Marigold and the Story Girl and Emily. They read CS Lewis and Robin McKinley. Kurt loved afternoons or mornings spent in another place or time, far from the kids who picked on him and pushed him about.

Right after his mother died, his dad pulled out boxes from the storage room upstairs and moved them into the long storage room in the basement. He told Kurt that no one would go through things there and that he’d promised his mom that he’d save the books for Kurt. Kurt went and hid other boxes and baskets and bins of stuff in that room as well over the next few days, as people came through to ‘help’ his dad go through his mom’s stuff. 

He didn’t go back to see what was in those boxes of books until school had started again after that summer.

The first box he’d opened had old books in it…old old books. Some had been over a hundred years old. There was one called Girl’s Nest and several about boy scouts on adventures and Mother Carey’s Chickens….which Summer Magic had been based off of. There was Little Women and Laddie.

One box was full of romance novels…adult ones. Kurt tucked those back into the box and set it aside. The next box was full of old books…paperbacks from when his mom was a teen. Romance paperbacks….teen romance paperbacks. There were historical ones and a series of romances, missing very few, only a few hundred pages long. Another box was filled with other books from his mother’s teen years; many he could tell were from book orders.

He didn’t open the box labeled Childhood books, because he remembered that box. They had read through it when he was small and then boxed them back up to make room on the shelves.

He turned to the last two boxes. One was full of more adult type books, fiction but not romance. He recognized not just books of his mother’s but some of his dad’s. The final box was filled with text books and coffee table books.

Kurt looked at the open boxes and grabbed one of the teen romance novels, just the first off the top.

Years later, Kurt would always find it hard to explain why a silly book called Thinking Of You was always listed as his third favorite book he’d ever read…but how do you explain, without a whole lot of time and trust, that it was the first book to make you feel connected to your mom again?


End file.
